Now that we understand some of your background and goal in your new frontier of Mineral Enhanced oils, can you give us some examples of the “science” behind essential oils?

Absolutely!  While some people look at essential oils from a “spiritual” perspective, I have researched them from a more scientific perspective, and oils have a lot of deep and rich science.  For example, many people understand that the same oil type grown in different parts of the earth can have different properties.

These differences can be shown in the different terpenoids and phenolic compounds that can be seen in a spectrograph of the oil.  What most people may not be aware of is that these components don’t change just based on soil composition and geographical locations.  They can also change from harvest to harvest even in the exact same field based on the amount of rain or sunlight, additional soil nutrients added, or even the temperature.

That is why I always like to look at the spectrograph of the oils that I am using when working on blends.  I want to make sure that each particular oils has the proper components to help augment the effect that we are looking for in the blend.  And this approach has also been showing up in scientific journals, such as this one:

Source: Sofia Lafhal, Pierre Vanloot, Isabelle Bombarda, Robert Valls, Jacky Kister, et al.. Raman spectroscopy for identification and quantification analysis of essential oil varieties: a multivariate approach applied to lavender and lavandin essential oils. Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, Wiley, 2015, 46 (6), pp.577-585. ff10.1002/jrs.4697ff. ffhal-01451419f  https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01451419/document 

While many people may not be experienced in reading and understanding this spectrograph, almost all of us can understand a very basic point from the table below published in this journal.  This table shows just 28 of the known compounds in lavender (there’s another table of additional components at the link above).  The point is that when you look at the “minimum and maximum” values outlined in red, you can easily tell that there can be a huge difference in the amount of various compounds in a particular harvest.  For example, lavender with a camphor content of 1.04 may perform very differently from lavender with a camphor content of only 0.17 depending on what you are using it for.  And this is why I want to see the spectrograph results for specific compounds in the essential oils that we use in our blends.